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Redfall | Review Thread
- Thread starter Draugoth
- Start date
ZehDon
Gold Member
So, they really did know it was a turd so much so that they felt the need to get out ahead of the inevitable. I hope we learn about what went on during the game's development - there's no way in hell they actually thought they'd delivered something worth buying.
kuncol02
Banned
Is that really anything not really visible from first glance? They were pushed to making GaaS game like Destiny or Avengers. After players went rabid on any GaaS game some higher up panicked and they decided to retool whole game to more classic coop game, but didn't really had time to do that (and game was not good enough to pour another tens of millions of dollars into it). Add to that engine that is absolutely not suited for type of game they were making and you have what we got.
MidGenRefresh
*Refreshes biennially
Is this a joke?
They had the balls to put in in the end credits because they knew nobody will ever see it.
Pasta la Vista
Member
Is this a joke?
"The challenge was to keep these elements strong as we added an open world mission structure and four-player co-op"
Oh FFS.
ZehDon
Gold Member
Well, other games that are notoriously bad - like Daikatana - were the results of its creators actually thinking the game was legitimately good. Spencer's recent comments gave the impression that Xbox truly believed the game was good, and were blindsided by the poor response. However, this message makes it clear that Arkane themselves absolutely knew they'd made something bad enough to require pre-empting the negative response.
Astray
Gold Member
Genuinely hope Arkane can survive this game without too much restructuring.
Normally bad games just bomb for 3rd parties and people gradually forget about them, but this game seems like it has something special about it: It was cause of great embarassment for Arkane's parent company (Microsoft), which not only made it into an ad-hoc 1st party exclusive, but also put a lot of weight on it as a system seller and worked hard to hype it up. As a result, now the perceived reputation of the platform's upcoming games is kind of seen through this lens, which isn't a great situation and will likely require years to wash off with good releases.
Not only did Phil put a lot of his weight and credibility behind this title, but it was even mentioned by Satya during an earning call right before its disastrous release, this level of high-profile embarrassment simply won't fly, and I predict that we will see high-profile departures from Arkane because of this kerfuffle.
Normally bad games just bomb for 3rd parties and people gradually forget about them, but this game seems like it has something special about it: It was cause of great embarassment for Arkane's parent company (Microsoft), which not only made it into an ad-hoc 1st party exclusive, but also put a lot of weight on it as a system seller and worked hard to hype it up. As a result, now the perceived reputation of the platform's upcoming games is kind of seen through this lens, which isn't a great situation and will likely require years to wash off with good releases.
Not only did Phil put a lot of his weight and credibility behind this title, but it was even mentioned by Satya during an earning call right before its disastrous release, this level of high-profile embarrassment simply won't fly, and I predict that we will see high-profile departures from Arkane because of this kerfuffle.
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
Pasta la Vista
Member
That "Thank You" message just made them look a whole lot worse. Anyone who actually purchased this at full price deserve their money back.
kuncol02
Banned
He said that more delays would not make it better game. He is well aware that whole idea of Redfall is bad and can't be really fixed. Even without bugs and performance problems it would score maybe 10% better.
F0rneus
Tears in the rain
Arkane taking a hard earned victory lap.
ZoukGalaxy
Member
Is this a joke?
Oh wow, they are really not self aware how trash their game is and blaming a short freeze like it as a year whole winter freeze... oh my god, how they survive in Nordic country ?
And how all others companies in the world managed to make awesome game in the same time ?
That's sarcastic, no need to reply seriously.
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Mr Hyde
Member
Are the comparisons only about 60 fps? Do you have any examples you can show? Sounds pretty ridiculous to compare these two games.
solidus12
Member
I keep getting tweets from fanboys complaining about how Zelda’s technical shortcomings aren’t an issue compared to Redfall. It’s a shitshow
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Is this a joke?
Leave it to video game companies.
The only industry in the world when they release a bad product and get grilled, they do the whole page long apology and corporate morale booster message all wrapped up in one.
Side note: Who knew an ice storm could make a video game bad. Interesting take on covid and other issues, since I thought tech workers were all for WFH because it's supposed to be so much more productive than needing to commute and waste time in board room meetings.
If after 5 years of development and obsessing over every detail has lead to this, just imagine what kind game they'd make if they got 4 years and were more careless. lol. When I played the game, in the first 30 seconds I could tell there were issues because the game has awful item detection where you sometimes got to be right on top of the item in a perfect spot just to pick up the item. That's some obsession over detail. They didnt even give a shit about making it easy to do like in every other game on the market.
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Captain Toad
Banned
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
They already had a day one tweet regarding performance issues.
This end credit blanket coverage message to gamers goes to show they knew the game was crap due to issues X, Y, Z, but it released anyway. So please give us slack for covid issues and a Texas ice storm. And here I thought game makers were more productive at home instead of slogging it to the office.... at least thats what they claim.
Dr.Morris79
Gold Member
Sounds like arse facts.
Phase
Member
While WFH has it's advantages, I would imagine being in the same room conversing and seeing each other's screens on a consistent basis would be important to developing a game.
Nydius
Member
The pandemic? Is anyone else tired of it being used as an excuse for things? I’m not going to pretend it didn’t have any impact because we know it certainly did. but when games like Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarok, Forza Horizon 5, A Plague Tale Requiem, LoZ Tears of the Kingdom, and (UE4 technical Issues aside) Jedi Survivor were all in development and released post-pandemic, blaming COVID for the state of Redfall is an indictment of piss poor studio management.Is this a joke?
“Global upheaval“? What kind of vague fuckery excuse is that? Are they trying to blame Russia and Ukraine? Or maybe a veiled dig at Trump? Inflation? In any case, none of that matters and if such externalities affected the development of their game, well again, that’s piss poor management.
The ice storm?! Are they seriously trying to blame a storm from February 2021 for the state of a game that launched in May 2023?? Holy shit, what a laughable excuse. Like EvilLore said, that storm only caused problems for a week, week and a half, tops. Pretty sure I was without power and water longer here in SE Oklahoma than Austin was.
That entire statement reads like a big pile of PR bullshit and excuses.
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
That's video game companies for ya.
Release shoddy games and the first thing you get are patches right away. Along with one of those page long apology tweets, but release it anyway. Or they play dumb hoping nobody notices until they got to respond. Gamers notice issues on launch day in the first hour, and the dev might tweet something stupid like "Oh, we never came across that issue during development. We'll look into it". So the game was in dev for 3 or 4 years, somehow none of the 100 employees and QA testers noticed issues and only gamers playing in the first hour the bugs or crashes magically only happen then. What a load of BS.
Is this the first time a studio did an ending credits message trying to lay blame on external factors? Not sure. I dont remember any other game where management says covid and ice storms affected the game. And oddly enough, if it's part of the ending credits the studio pre-planned the message in the game knowing it would be some kind of farewell excuses after gamers beat the game and realize how crap it is.
It's like eating a shit bag of chips and at the bottom of the bag there's a note saying "thanks for eating our chips, we had covid issues and ice storms....wink wink, I hope you give us a break for this bag of crap because we had production issues, but decided to sell you it anyway"
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semiconscious
Member
y'know, as much as i like/support arkane, & the fact that i've sorta enjoyed redfall, this has to be some kind of record 'scrapping the bottom of the barrel' excuse if ever i've heard one. the implication here that 'global upheaval' is something of recent development following decades of 'non-global upheaval'? the words 'shameful' & 'embarrassing' don't do this justice. what privileged planet had these folks been living on?...
Daneel Elijah
Gold Member
There is a whole article but I do not know of the real source. Eurogamer article have a few good parts. But in the Gamespot one, it seems that the talk was on a video/podcast?
It just seems that the director felt the last few years pretty hard. This end game message is from him after all. I don't know if making it all about himselft is better than making excuses...
In both cases this is not good in retrospect. But I hope that this message was made a few months/years ago. When they believed that the game would be ready for release and in a better state than what we got.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Considering he brought up Ukraine/Russia global upheaval, the message was made recently.
What happened is that the game was junk, had a delay already and MS said we got to ship this thing out. Cant let it be in development for a 6th or 7th year etc....
So Harvey and Ricardo knew this game would be lousy. And the best thing they could think of (instead of facing the music and replying directly to people the past two weeks) is to add in a canned message at the end of the game. It's their way of replying, but replying in a way like: "well, here you go. We know the game stinks and has issues. Here's our excuses. See ya later"
Daneel Elijah
Gold Member
In the interview he was talking about Brexit so I did not make the link with Ukraine. Thanks.
demigod
Member
Isn’t it funny how the pandemic only affects ms studios and nobody else.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Ah ok. Probably the first dev ever to bring up Brexit. Who knows, Maybe it fucked up their production in France.
Daneel Elijah
Gold Member
It was just a mention. If you read the article this is a lot of complaining but not that much of real problems like PCs being destroyed like it happened to No mans sky.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Sounds to me they had a lazy attitude during covid. It seems other game companies released quality games the past bunch of years. And he even says they could focus on fewer platforms, since there's no more PS version to make so that should free up time and resources. Maybe if they didnt give everyone Fridays off they'd make a better game and it wouldnt need a delay.
During covid, the people who didn't work were people whose job was scrapped due to shutdowns (skewed to front line service workers like people in stores, restaurants, etc...). Most people still worked. And many office people were blessed because a good chunk of us get a laptop so we just log in from home 5 days a week instead of commuting to the office. There were no bonus Fridays off due to covid. And tech workers are the kind who have access to WFH right off the bat. Just take home the PC rig and double monitor home to use just like our IT department said to us if you want to bring home your double Samsung monitors and docking station go ahead. Nobody was forced to only go off their laptop screen. Some people at the office had desktop towers (some people in marketing who do graphics and packaging shit) probably because they are way more powerful than out laptops. They were allowed to take it home to continue working.
A very weird take by Arkane Lyon. Because at my company when covid shit the fan and all of us got told to clear out our office and dont come back till we tell you to, I think just about all of us worked harder because we wanted to do the right thing and nobody in office knew if we'd be fired like all the store workers you'd hear about getting shut down. So taking a chill pill attitude is a total 180 than what our company did. We still had monthly and quarterly sales to hit. It's not like covid happened and the CEO said "hey everyone, take Fridays off and I'm going to reduce the sales targets 20% so you guys can chill out". We still had to keep working. It was just a matter of how smoothly we'd all adjust to doing online Teams meetings for everything instead of booking meeting rooms and doing it in person. It took coordination because hardly anyone did online meetings since everyone was at the office, so everyone had to brush up their online conference call hosting skills.
GS article.
Redfall creative director Harvey Smith believes the range of issues that developer Arkane faced during the development of the vampire game would have "tanked" a different studio. Appearing on the Iron Lords podcast, Smith listed off the many real-world events that transpired during the development of Redfall, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the January 6 storming of the US Capitol, murder hornets, aliens, and power outages in its local community of Austin, Texas, and much more.
"This team has been through so much along the way. We started this project before COVID. We've had the pandemic, everybody went work-from-home, we had the Great Resignation. In Austin, we had multiple ice storms that shut the electrical grid down for weeks at a time. We had to boil our water for a while. The country had an insurrection. We had important social movements happening across the country. We had murder hornets," Smith said. "The Air Force was talking about aliens at one point. We had so many things happen in the last few years that I think would have tanked a lot of development teams."
Smith went on to say: "At Arkane, we didn't work people too hard. We gave everybody Fridays off during the worst part of the pandemic. The company was kind enough to extend the [release] date so we did not have to crunch ourselves to death. We just kept putting the love into it."
Another major event that happened during Redfall's development was that studio owner ZeniMax got bought by Microsoft. This represented a "sea change" for Arkane, Smith said, in part because it allowed the studio to focus on fewer platforms because PlayStation was now out of the mix.
Smith also mentioned that the potential audience for Redfall is bigger than anything Arkane has seen before thanks to Game Pass. People might see that the next game from Arkane is out and on Game Pass and opt to try it out thanks to Game Pass, Smith said.
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semiconscious
Member
from gamespot:
fucking amazing!:
'so, let me freely conflate the local/personal, such as ice storms (which sounds legit bad) with the universal, such as covid/wfh/'gr' (get in line), an 'insurrection' (smh. you want an actual 'insurrection'? go to france), social movements (nope, never had none of them before), & then throw in killer hornets & ufos for the hell of it (& to show how hep i am), & offer that as an excuse...'
'would have tanked a lot of developments teams'? does he appreciate the fact that all other development teams worldwide had to contest (except for the ice storms) with exactly the same things? or is he so far up his ass as to be completely oblivious to this?...
azertydu91
Hard to Kill
I'm french and honestly , it's not that bad.At least way less impactful than covid or Ukraine.
semiconscious
Member
yeah, well, if you think your insurrection isn't that bad, you should've seen ours (i mean, it lasted all of several hours)...
Nydius
Member
Jesus Christ, this is so much worse than the Thank You screen of excuses.
I already addressed COVID in my last post but I'll reiterate the point: COVID didn't prevent high quality games from releasing by other studios. Not just triple-A, but smaller devs and indie devs. COVID threw wrenches in the plan, but good developers with good management teams were able to compensate and still put out good games.
The Great Resignation? If people were leaving your company en masse, that's a YOU problem, Harvey.
Multiple ice storms? No, there was one very bad ice storm two years ago that caused electrical and water problems for about a week. Not "weeks at a time". That's straight up hyperbolic bullshit.
Insurrection? Give me a fucking break. Last I checked, Austin was around 1500 miles from Washington D.C., so whatever happened on January 6, 2021 should have had no impact on the game's development whatsoever. But don't miss an opportunity to parrot your politial leanings I suppose, right Harvey?
Murder hornets and aliens? To use one of my late father's phrases: "What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" Those things have not a single damn thing to do with game development so why the fuck are they even issues being brought up?
No, Harvey -- it's only tanked your development team. The rest of the world had to deal with the pandemic, work from home, inflation, political craziness (not just in the United States), supply chain issues, chip shortages, and so on -- and yet they've still been able to deliver competent products.
If these are the kinds of pathetic excuses he's going to make for a game that isn't even good at its core (unlike Jedi Survivor, which has similar technical issues but is a solid game that can be patched through), this guy has no business being in management. Not just game dev, but management in general. He clearly doesn't know how to run the studio.
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YeulEmeralda
Member
If we're honest about it none of the big things humanity ever accomplished was done without crunch.
Sooner or later a 4 day work week is going to hit reality.
Sooner or later a 4 day work week is going to hit reality.
azertydu91
Hard to Kill
Maybe i got used to it , I remember as a teenager being in the 2006 ghetto insurrection and maybe my younger eyes found them more impressive but it truly felt like an insurrection lately France feels like it is on a regular strike.
BlueLyria
Member
I want whatever crack pipe he's smoking.
Dr. Kitty Muffins
Member
I think it is obvious that people will leave Arkane to start up another studio or simply apply to work at other companies who handle game development better than this. They were a tremendous developer before this. No one with any pride is going to tolerate this. It's hurtful. Mismanaging a games development and having that game attached to your name is hurtful. They put in a lot of work just to have it shipped out before it's time.
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freefornow
Gold Member
I think the the only pipe he is smoking is covered in blue veins that belong to somone who's name starts with P.
azertydu91
Hard to Kill
Pablo Picasso.....That's probably where the famous Blue Period came from.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Can anyone in software development explain to a non-gaming worker like me how covid, capitol hill protests, a temporary ice storm in Texas (and I'm not even sure what murder hornets mean) can mess up a game which had 5 years of development and Harvey even said they didn't even have to make the PS version anymore, so that freed up resources. Especially when there's been lots of other good games that were released the past year or two by other studios?
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Dr. Claus
Vincit qui se vincit
ChorizoPicozo
Member
lies.
jm89
Member
Carbon monoxide straight from his gas cooker.
Majima Everywhere System
Member
Sounds like a message from a director who was the only one who wanted this turd idea pushed out, and he thanks everyone for putting up with a shit concept for 5 years.
Now, on to something creaters and players will get behind.
Now, on to something creaters and players will get behind.
Nydius
Member
That was the nickname given to the Asian Giant Hornets that briefly infested certain areas of the United States in 2021. They got the name because videos showed them viciously murdering honeybees. But like every other media sensation in the post-pandemic world, they turned out to be a whole lot of nothing. They were limited mostly to Washington State and eradicated by the end of the year, not to be seen since.
As for the rest of your question, you probably already know the answer: It has nothing to do with it at all. It's all just excuses. If I were working on a networking project and did a half assed job and tried using the same excuses, my bosses would laugh as security escorted me out of the building. Yet, for some reason (and particularly in game dev), these kind of excuses aren't just tolerated, they actively let people fail upward into positions they should never hold.
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HeisenbergFX4
Gold Member
It’s called free stuff from the Xbox team
He says he PURCHASED like 4 of the external plug in SSDs for the Series consoles.
Funny that Ybarra specifically said the SSDs was something Xbox gave out to people for positive feedback
People should really stop quoting him as he is nothing more than an extension of Xbox PR